If you are developing a 3.x RCP application you should remain using the 3.x version. If on the other hand are just starting to develop a new RCP app by all means use the new E4 layer.

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If you are developing a 3.x RCP application you should remain using the 3.x version. If on the other hand are just starting to develop a new RCP app by all means use the 4.1 SDK which allows direct development of E4 applications (it is, afterall, an E4 app itself).

=== Menu/TB Issues: ===

=== Menu/TB Issues: ===

Revision as of 16:45, 10 March 2011

Contents

Eclipse 4.1 SDK

The focus on 4.1 has been on bringing it up to a point where it's functionally usable on a day-to-day basis.In general we've achieved this, we have a ways to go before we can match the legacy eclipse's 100+ Million man-hours of use but it's time to begin putting more eyes and hands on it.

This page is intended to let you know what issues have already been identified. This is a living document and will be updated at the end of each milestone. It represents the current state of the 4.1 SDK's compatibility layer for those that decide to switch over to the new world.

When using the 4.1 SDK for developemnt Please report any loss of functionality as a defect. One of the advantages of working on the E4 codebase is that our bug 'fix' rate is far above that of the 3.x stream, meaning that the time between a defect being reported and a fix arriving is many times a matter of hours, not days, the hard part for us is finding all of the corner cases for each component.

Known Issues

There are however parts of the 4.1 SDK where we have already identified issues that new users are sure to notice. Note that we've tried to allocate our time specifically on those areas that directly affect the usability of the SDK. We expect many of these issues to be addressed before 4.1 ships with the remainder to be addressed during the 4.2 development cycle (see below, deferred items are indicated with '(4.2)').

No Intro:

(4.2) The Welcome screen will not appear for fresh workspaces. This has relatively low impact on development activities and is fairly high cost to get right so it has been deferred to the 4.2 release.

No / Better RCP Support:

If you are developing a 3.x RCP application you should remain using the 3.x version. If on the other hand are just starting to develop a new RCP app by all means use the 4.1 SDK which allows direct development of E4 applications (it is, afterall, an E4 app itself).

Menu/TB Issues:

We are still experiencing ordering issues with menu and toolbar items

There may be instances where an item is visible or enabled when it should not be

(4.2) Capabilities / Activities are not integrated into the Command system's processing. While this is unlikely to be completely done by the release of 4.1 we've defaulted everything to 'on'. This may result in more menu items than you see in 3.x but should guarantee that anything you need should be there.

CSS / Style Issues:

The UI is not yet completely polished, so there may be some rendering artifacts (especially after changing Themes

Acceptance of the new Look is (of course) a matter of taste, if it's not to yours you can change it using the Preferences->Appearance page to set the Theme to 'Classic' (which mimics as much as possible of the 3.x look).

No Fast Views:

This was intentionally dropped since it has been subsumed by the ability to minimize any stack to the trim.

Perspective Switcher:

Cannot dock the Perspective Switcher on the left

Cannot save a custom perspective

Known Advantages

On the plus side there are a number of things that you can do in the 4.1 SDK that you cannot do in 3.x:

Detached Windows can contain multiple stacks

You can mix editors and views in the same stack

You can place views into the editor area, great for high content views like the Console